Can Andrew Lincoln win back The Walking Dead fans with promise of ‘levity’?

If there’s one thing I don’t think I need too much of in The Walking Dead, it’s levity. Most fans of the show aren’t here for cheerfulness, for mirth, or for humour (especially now Abraham’s fabulous way with words has been battered out of the game). But levity is exactly what Andrew Lincoln is promising in the second half of season 7.

Yes, that’s correct. The man who has just spent the first half of the season bringing Rick’s bloodshot, permanently glassy eyes and thousand-yard stare to glorious life is now about to bring some light-heartedness back into proceedings. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lincoln even says that reading the script of the final episode in season 7 made him do ‘a little jig’. Hopefully not in character mind you. I’m not ready to see Rick busting any kind of little dance moves yet.

But Lincoln is happy to talk up the second half of season 7 as everything that fans are hoping for. If the first half of season 7 was too miserable, too bleak and with a Rick none of us wanted to recognise, then strap in for part B of the season where The Walking Dead will do its best to win back any of the fans that have walked away recently.

Lincoln says of the next eight episodes, “It’s probably the opposite of what you just witnessed. Certainly from Rick’s point of view. You see a man in action again with some of the members of his closest family. There’s a lot more levity, if you can believe that, than you’ve ever seen before in Mr. Grimes. There’s sort of a freedom in him, a feeling that comes from losing everything… It’s the thrill of the fight again.”

He also throws a bone to all those fans who don’t feel that they recognise the new Rick who has been very much broken over the previous eight episodes, claiming that “it certainly feels very much more like a show that I knew and recognized in the back eight.”

Another criticism of the first half of season 7 was that the central characters were too spread out and so we didn’t get to see enough of any of them, and certainly not enough interplay between them. Lincoln has an answer for that one too, saying that now we are about to see that “the band is back together. It’s The Magnificent Seven in the back half.”

Wait, don’t most of The Magnificent Seven die in that movie? Uh-oh. Perhaps there won’t be so much levity after all.

What do you think? Is levity what is missing from The Walking Dead in season 7?

Source: EW